Entertainment

PDF Toolbox: 40+ Tools to Rip, Mix and Burn PDFs

We were unsurprised to learn today that someone has just posted the entire new Harry Potter book on the PDF hosting site Scribd. That's part of the appeal of these sites, of course: fast, free PDF sharing. The desktop and web tools that went before aren't so simple, and not all of them are free. But while Adobe Acrobat (US$449) still reigns supreme, there are plenty of other ways to rip, mix and burn your PDFs.

RIP PDFs ONLINE

Adobe's Create PDF Online takes your file in a number of formats (MS Office, RTF, AutoCAD) or will take a whack at OCR (optical character recognition) of your scanned docs. Pick your shots with this super-service, you only get five before they start asking for money.

BCL Technology's PDF Online takes almost anything you'll feed it and emails it back as a PDF.

ESP's PDF-o-matic takes web pages and turns them into PDFs, handy for offline viewing or integrating into papers or presentations.

Neevia's online PDF masher offers fine control of settings like image resolution and PDF version compatibility.

PDF4U is unlimited in quantity but limited in size. As in, 35K. So don't attempt to send them your 5,000 page illustrated history of the avocado.

Sanface offers Text2PDF, which takes text pasted into a window and PDFs it right there.

Then there's DrawLoop's Loop Service that swallows your Word docs, Excel, PDFs and the rest and spits out a single PDF.

Zamzar will convert any document to just about any other format—including PDF.

DESKTOP RIPPING

Ghostscript is the venerable old-skool PDF hack. It's been around for years, and it's free. Caveat: Not for the faint-hearted, this is a classic engineer's dream that will seem as user-friendly as DOS to some people.

Softland's doPDF is a free printer driver that hooks into Windows and makes PDFs from any app that has a print command.

PDF995's been around for years, powering its decent—for free, at least—tools by sticking ads in them. Lots of users means lots of stability, for what it's worth.

Nuance's PDF Converter does cost some bread, but it opens up a lot of cool features you never knew you couldn't live without (gives your right-clicking ring finger more PDF power than you thought was possible).

e-PDF Converter purports to do a lot of the same things in its various iterations.

DocuDesk's deskPDF claims to work with 300 different apps, including some pretty heavy graphics tools.

Bluebeam PDF Revu costs more than most desktop apps not named Acrobat, but its hooks into Office save time and clicks.

At one point, Larry Page lobbied for putting the thinner Foxit Reader in the Google Pack mobile utilities download, but the team convinced him that Adobe Reader was a better fit. For a lot of people, this company's PDF tools are where price meets performance. The company's Text Viewer utility extracts text into editable files.

Apago's claim to fame is PDF Shrink and PDF Optimizer, which throw out all the junk in a PDF file to make it thin-as-possible for uploading to the Web—but they've recently expanded their line of widgets to do more.

Arts PDF's PDF Linker plugs in to Acrobat and checks links and bookmarks, a painful manual process for long or short-complicated PDFs.

VeryPDF's Advanced PDF Tools lets you tweak many settings in a document, from page orientation to how it opens and metadata (i.e. you can stash "Paris Hilton nude" in this hidden data field and amp up your document's download numbers).

If anyone who is blind or otherwise visually impared will read your document, read Adobe's accessibility tutorials for good advice on design and formatting that makes it easier for that audience to consume your content whether or not you're using Acrobat to toast your PDFs.

BURN PDFs

Scribd ("scribed") wants to be the YouTube of document sharing. PDF insiders also know that the site is a good hack for making quality files for free because it offers one-document-at-a-time access to Cadillac Adobe server software.

YouScript is a social network for Hollywood writers and wannabes sharing their scripts, mostly. But anyone can use it for their own devices.

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